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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to processing poultry meat and particularly to apparatus and methods employed to remove the outer skin and debone poultry meat portions to provide skinless, boneless, poultry meat products.
2. Description of the Related Art
The poultry industry has for many years produced skinless and deboned poultry meat products for retail sale as a whole or ground up final product. The demand for such poultry products has continued to grow at a significant rate, yet, apparatus and methods priorly and currently used have failed to develop an automated apparatus and method which provide the desired degree of the requirements of efficiency, sanitation, speed, and simplicity of manufacture and operation.
Some improvements in this area are represented, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,402,112 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,264,542. Separate poultry skinning and deboning apparatus are described in these patents which require separate handling of the poultry portions for complete processing.
The present invention relates to a poultry processing apparatus which sequentially combines removal of the outer skin from a poultry thigh portion and separation of the meat from the bone portion in a once through manner. Therefore only a single feeding step is required to achieve the desired skinless and boneless thigh meat product in a highly efficient, sanitary and faster manner.
The present invention incorporates skinning apparatus which pulls, rather than cuts, the outer skin layer from the underlying meat portion similar to that described in my U.S. Pat. No. 6,264,542 which is incorporated by reference herein. The deboning portion of the apparatus includes a water knife for separating the poultry meat portion from the thigh bone of the skinned thigh portion having some structural features similar to those described in my U.S. Pat. No. 4,402,112 which also is incorporated by reference herein.
The present invention also provides an efficient structure to sequentially combine the skinning and deboning operations in a once through process utilizing a single feed inlet and means to control the path of travel and the bone-in thigh portion""s disposition relative to the skinning and deboning components to achieve the desired skinned and deboned end product.
Further, the present invention includes improvements related to product handling and the cutting means for separating the meat from the bone. This improves the meat removal function resulting in a higher yield of the final boneless meat product.